Gathering nearly 300 of the world's top scientists including 11 Nobel laureates, the World Laureates Association (WLA) Forum 2024 was held in Shanghai recently, discussing the use of science and technology to shape a sustainable future and improve the common well-being of humankind.

This year, AI-related topics occupied an important part and attracted top experts' and industry professionals' attention.

When AI becomes a new productivity, are we ready to deal with the "double-edged sword" effect brought by AI?

Science or technology is neutral, but sci-tech development sometimes brings unexpected threats and challenges, including global warming, regional disputes and others, David Gross, 2004 Nobel laureate in physics, said in his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the forum. "This requires global scientists to cooperate to cope with the ever-changing problems and guide science for good. Young scientists need to step up and take on the responsibility."

With the development of AI, scientific research is ushering in a series of new breakthroughs, according to E Weinan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and dean of the Beijing Institute of Big Data Research. He said AI has become an indispensable tool in many scientific researches. For example, the AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts a protein's 3D structure from its amino acid sequence, solved the basic problems that had plagued biological science for many years.

AI does not bring threats at its birth, but opportunities are accompanied by threats. Regarding the ethical risks and security challenges behind AI, Gong Ke, executive director of the Chinese Institute of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategies, said that there are now hundreds of AI-related governance frameworks or declarations, but they are "fragmented" and hard to coordinate and implement. Therefore accelerating the establishment of a global AI governance framework is an urgent task.

Christopher Pissarides, 2010 Nobel laureate in economics, spoke about the impact of AI on future human work. He said that the era of widespread application of AI may be coming, but its current application is still very limited. According to his theoretical research and social surveys, AI application scenarios are relatively simple in most cases, and the main applications are image recognition and monitoring. AI technology may constitute a new human-machine competition and reduce the welfare of employees. According to him, while improving productivity, technology should improve the welfare of employees.

Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, said computer scientists not only need to "ensure that the algorithms we build and the designs we choose can benefit humankind," but also work closely with experts in fields such as economics, sociology, behavioral science, law and policy research to solve problems creatively.